A Quote by Alain de Botton

A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

Alain de Botton

Quote Topics

Beauty Exception Happiness Hints Implicit Knowledge Lump Our Rises Sight Throat

Quote Author

Alain de Botton
English - Writer
Born: December 20, 1969

Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.

Robert Fulghum

For thirty years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I'm ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks... "Problem or inconvenience?" I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.

Robert Fulghum

One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.

Robert Fulghum

I had a sore throat for a long time and it scared me. I saw a lump in my throat and I was terrified. I wouldn't go to a doctor.

Anne Ramsey

Later when I thought of the chickens, one of those rare pale blue eggs rose up into my throat. The chickens had been part of our family, and the egg in my throat was the feeling of something missing. It was hard and smooth and heavy, but also so fragile it might break and make me cry. It was the feeling of growing out of a favorite shirt, milk spilled on the floor, the last bit of honey in the jar, falling apple blossoms. It was the lump in the throat behind everything beautiful in life.

Melissa Coleman

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Gordon W. Allport

Sight is by much the noblest of the senses. We receive our notices from the other four, through the organs of sensation only. We hear, we feel, we smell, we taste, by touch. But sight rises infinitely higher. It is refined above matter, and equals the faculty of spirit.

Laurence Sterne

I felt a lump in my throat as the ball went in.

Terry Venables

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

Robert Frost

A lump in the throat is worth two on the head.

Walt Kelly

Kids can be a pain in the neck when they're not a lump in your throat.

Barbara Johnson

The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.